Page 51 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

ceptually and historically, had long been de¤ned as a condition for the vitality
of the Muslim collective. In its contemporary elaboration, da"wa de¤nes a kind
of practice involving the public use of a mode of reasoning whereby the cor-
rectness of an action is argued and justi¤ed in the face of error, doubt, indiffer-
ence, or counterargument. I say “public” precisely insomuch as to assume the
position of da"iya (the one who does da"wa) is to adopt the rhetorical stance of
a member of the Islamic umma acting on behalf of that particular histori-
cal project (and thus not simply as an individual concerned for his or her own
moral conduct). In this sense, although such a da"wa public has only become
possible with the contemporary emergence of a range of Islamic institutions, it
is less an empirical entity than a framework for a particular type of action. It is
constituted whenever and wherever individuals enter into that form of dis-
course geared toward upholding or improving the moral condition of the col-
lective as a whole, as illustrated, for example, in both the conversations de-
scribed above. As a type of activity aimed at shaping other practices through
persuasion, exhortation, and deliberation, it is fundamentally a political prac-
tice, and hence is distinct from both the web of personal relationships and pub-
lic representations of cultural identity (e.g., public ceremonies, Islamic media
productions), neither of which are grounded in processes of deliberation. In-
deed, da"wa emerges not at a point of commonality but precisely at one of dif-
ference, where a discrepancy in practice makes argument necessary.
While da"wa frequently takes the form of discussion and deliberation, its
paradigmatic speech genre is the sermon. Notably the interpretive norms in-
forming Islamic homiletic traditions foreground the capacity of ethical speech—
particularly one imbued with the language of the Quran and the teachings of
the sunna—to move the sensitive heart toward correct practice. A well-crafted
sermon is understood to evoke in the listener the affective dispositions that
underlie ethical conduct and reasoning, and which, through repeated listening,
may become sedimented in the listener’s character. Enabled in part by the me-
diatization of sermons on cassette, the norms governing sermon practice have
been extended by the da"wa movement to the dialogical context of public dis-
course. Within this arena speech is deployed in order to construct moral selves:
to reshape character, attitude, and will in accord with contemporary standards
of pious behavior. The ef¤cacy of an argument here devolves not solely on its
power to gain cognitive assent on the basis of its superior reasoning, as would
be the case in some versions of a liberal public sphere, but also on its ability to
move the moral self toward correct modes of being and acting. A language ide-
ology foregrounding poetic and affective aspects, sensory modes of under-
standing outside the realm of semantics narrowly construed, provide conceptual
scaffolding here. In other words, what joins the practice of delivering or listen-
ing to a sermon with that of arguing with a neighbor is a conception of the
rhetorical force of ethical speech to shape character. Deliberative and disciplin-
ary moments are thoroughly interwoven and interdependent within this arena.
As conceived by its participants, the da"wa public constitutes that space of
communal re®exivity and action understood as necessary for perfecting and

40 Charles Hirschkind